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Godax published only two games for the Electron. Both came in impressive, large, square, oversized, plastic boxes with glossy cover art with the tag-line "Hi Tech Entertainment" under the funky Godax logo. Their first game was Skirmish, a buzzard-baiting platformer that went down in the annals of Electron history as an instant classic. Their next was Kourtyard, with which Godax withered on the vine. If there was a software equivalent of a music one-hit wonder, it was Godax and that splendid debut. And this game on the shelves had all the packaging design flair of its predecessor. It's a shame that what was inside the box was, well, not worth playing.

The game is meant to be an overhead scrolling map game, of the Repton/Ravenskull style. Your mission is to retrieve four medieval objects, and the baffling instructions inform you that you are King Arthur who has, for some unknown reason, "disguised himself" as a footsoldier. If anyone asks, they go on, you are definitely not King Arthur, you are actually Private Arthur King. However, this foolproof plan, for some bizarre reason, doesn't seem to have convinced any of the pillagers whose paths you will cross in your search for treasure. They have decided instead to launch a multitude of arrows in your direction. And these arrows actually look less like those that fly through the air and more like those impressed on your keypad...!

Come to think of it, nothing quite looks right in Kourtyard, from the odd, identical tree-trunks randomly sprouting in grid-like formation, to the blocky rivers and bridges that litter the landscape. Still, whether you're anxious to get into the quest, or whether you just need to move out of the way of one of those flying arrows, it won't be long until you move somewhere that commands the screen to scroll. And this is where Kourtyard instantly falls apart.

Kourtyard's scrolling is the worst scrolling routine I have ever encountered in any game ever. I don't make that claim lightly. I've played games on the Spectrum, the C64 and even the Sinclair ZX81, and never have I seen such a trite and crummy scroller in a commercial program before. The game pauses, removes the entirety of the playing area including you, and any enemies (and arrows) that were on-screen, and then redraws the playing area again scrolled one "block" in whichever direction you moved. It then plonks you back on top of the exact position where you were - a very disconcerting experience! - and treats the move as if you have entered a fresh "room", introducing a new adversary to replace the previous one.

Whatever Kourtyard was originally intended to be, this "feature" throws the entire game into pandemonium. It allows you to avoid being hit by an arrow by simply using the scroll to make it disappear! It prevents the arrows you fired yourself from finding their quarry. It allows a baffling "two speed" traversing to enter the fray - from any position towards the bottom of the playing area, you can hit the move down key several times, constantly "wiping" a new playing area over yourself and covering ground much more quickly than it takes to walk back up across it.

That playing area is also an oddity. The developers have chosen to use the Electron's highest quality mode, thus giving them access to all seven colours in low resolution. Most developers avoid that particular mode because it slows down the screen refresh. Here we have a game that uses it, but uses it pointlessly; on many occasions seeming content to only need four different colours on screen anyway. The game would presumably have run with a lower number of colours and would have allowed for a proper scroll to be programmed!

Persevere with the game - and to do so, you really will need an almost superhuman suspension of disbelief - and you'll find that, the more you play it, the more irritating it gets. Beware, Arthur King, of the completely stationary pirate flags. Ooh, scary. Watch out for the patrolling bad guys who hurl hundreds of arrows at you, even when you're standing outside of the castle and they couldn't possibly know you were there and there's a solid wall between you and them. Ooh, scarier. Watch out for the dreaded water which will drain your energy level. And always remember that the game will thrill you with the sound of a single bup noise to signify an arrow being fired by somebody. Finally, hang on in there for the amazing Game Over riff - it's really something to be astonished by!

What an absolutely lamentable game this is. I haven't even mentioned, as yet, the fact that half the screen is filled with garbage, presumably because it's so "big and sophisticated" that it needs to use screen memory for storage because all the Electron's other memory is stuffed full of code. Big it may be, sophisticated... No.

Considering, on the other side of the tape, you get a fairly decent BBC version of the game (drab and boring, yes, but not essentially unplayable), it's fairly clear that what went wrong here was in the conversion of Kourtyard from BBC to Electron, not in the original idea for the game. That's not to forgive it though. The Electron version is clearly powered by completely different code. Monstrous code that should've been strangled at birth in favour of just releasing a BBC game.

But no, Godax exposed its Electron conversion incompetence to the whole world... and it didn't live to tell the tale. Back in the day, I personally knew some people who loved Skirmish and spent several weeks' pocket money on Kourtyard purely on the strength of the original game. They were pretty sanguine about the experience. "It taught me a valuable lesson," said one. "Never judge a book by its cover."

If you collect crap games, then this is certainly one of the worst. None of the Electron magazines were sent copies in advance of release so Godax probably got a few hundred sales under its belt before word got out as to how bad it was. If you go searching for a physical version of it, expect to pay around £3. Just look at it though, don't attempt to actually play it.